


In my next life, a workhorse

by estei



Category: Bandom, Panic At The Disco, The Sounds
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-12
Updated: 2012-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-31 00:53:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estei/pseuds/estei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for no_tags 2012 for the prompt: "52. Spencer/Ryan(/Maja) - Spencer and Maja become bff's. Ryan is disconcerted by the development."</p>
            </blockquote>





	In my next life, a workhorse

Spencer jumps when knuckles rap against the side of his cubicle. His shoulders hunch in, as though the curve of his spine can protect him against whatever annoyance is about to be perpetrated.

“Smith.” The nasal tone of his manager is unwelcome to say the least.

“Yes, Mr. Calhoun?” Spencer clicks out of the solitaire window and starts typing, trying to project an air of someone too busy to be bothered. He isn’t surprised when he feels Calhoun’s presence lingering over his shoulder. He glances back, follows the line of the blue tie up to Calhoun’s pale moon face. His lips are pressed together, a slash under his bulbous nose.

“The printer is jammed,” Calhoun says.

“Right,” Spencer nods. “Don’t you think that’s a job for Oleg? You know, Oleg from IT?”

“Oleg is engaged elsewhere,” Calhoun announces, which Spencer takes to mean I’m an asshole who is afraid of people with accents. “I don’t think I need to remind you that as administrative coordinator for the new partnerships group it is your responsibility to provide support as needed. Right now I need your support in handling this printer situation.”

Spencer recognizes that now that the printer jam has been upgraded to “situation” status his cause is lost.

“Right,” he says again. “I’ll take a look.”

Calhoun smiles and claps his hands together. “See now, I knew we could work together on this.”

Spencer slumps back into his chair as he watches the manager walk away, threading himself through the cubicle maze and back to his corner office. He thinks about walking out and not coming back. He thinks about the email Calhoun accidentally sent to him three months ago that was addressed to his ex-girlfriend, and about wallpapering the office with copies of it. He thinks about how much he hates every second he spends in this place, but after five minutes of glaring at the walls he gets out of his chair and walks to the printer room.

Of course, Spencer’s willingness to try and fix the printer doesn’t mean that he has the skills to do so. After opening the various covers and peering under the trays and the ink cartridge and pushing buttons with increasing levels of violence, Spencer is forced to concede defeat. Except that would mean going to Calhoun’s office, knocking on the frame of the open door and then waiting as Calhoun held his hand for silence, and then, after a long pause, beckoned him in. No, that is unacceptable.

Spencer pulls the paper trays out and crouches down low, trying to peer inside and up. There’s bound to be a crumpled up asshole piece of paper stuck in there somewhere and he is going to find it and destroy it in punishment for ruining his afternoon of computer games. He’s so busy imagining his fiery retribution that he doesn’t notice someone else has come into the printer room.

“Maybe you should call Oleg,” Maja says. Spencer jumps and bangs the back of his head on the bypass tray. He recognizes her voice immediately; there aren’t a lot of women in the office with Swedish accents.

“Fuck,” he says, more from embarrassment than actual pain. He sits back on his heels and looks up, smoothing down his button up where its bunched around his middle. Maja should look just as awkward in her outfit, brown flats with a pencil skirt and pink cardigan, but somehow even clothes Spencer recognizes from Walmart look good on her. Maja works in accounting, which seems to mean that she works with spreadsheets of sprawling numbers and equations that make Spencer’s head hurt. They’ve never really had a conversation, except one brief exchange about the weather two weeks after Spencer had first started in the office and everyone filed outside dutifully for a mid-afternoon fire drill.

“Yeah,” he says, when it’s become clear that Maja is going to wait for a response. “Mr. Calhoun asked me to deal with it. Apparently it’s jammed, but I can’t find anything.”

“Oleg is in the kitchen. He says he’s testing the taps, but I think he’s just bored. He might actually be grateful for the distraction.” Maja pauses. “Mr. Calhoun wouldn’t know. He’s on a call with head office and I know for a fact he won’t be finished for another hour.” She bounces a little on her heels and tilts her head, considering. Her shoulders are very straight, Spencer is a little jealous of her perfect posture.

“Oh,” Spencer says. Maja reaches down and smiles and Spencer feels his cheeks flush as he puts his hand in hers. She’s stronger than she looks and between the two of them Spencer almost over balances. Maja laughs, a spectacular cackle that Spencer does not expect and he laughs with her.

“Come, Spencer. We’ll get Oleg and then you and I will go to Starbucks. No one will notice we’re gone.” Maja rubs her palms together and waggles her eyebrows. Spencer doesn’t know why she’s talking to him, why she wants to spend time with him, but he doesn’t want her to stop.

“Okay,” Spencer says. He feels something giddy and hopeful rise in his chest.

And like that, they are friends. They conspire by the water cooler and glare at Calhoun’s back and send each other dozens of emails per day, links to cat videos and Parks and Recreation GIFs and horrible Tumblrs. They eat lunch in the mezzanine, knees pressed together as they sit side by side on the bench by the fountain, sandwiches on wax paper across their laps. They don’t talk about how they ended up as drones for a financial corporation, they don’t talk about their friends or families or could-have-beens. They talk about their coworkers first, later about the music they listen to, the movies they see and the galleries and bookstores and coffee shops they wander through.

Spencer tries to explain it Ryan once, over dinner at their apartment. He hasn’t seen Ryan much; their schedules are opposite again. Ryan is working at the vegan burrito take-out down the street from their place. He isn’t responsible for any real food prep. Mostly he just takes down orders and punches numbers into the cash register, but he does have to peel the avocados and dump them into the food processor for the guacamole. Spencer knows it won’t last long, but at the moment Ryan works four evenings a week, so he sleeps in late and lurks around the library and the tea shop with the friends that followed him to the city from college. He writes poetry on the back of receipts and then tapes the paper slips onto the pages of his Moleskine.

Spencer doesn’t really get it, but he knows better than to say that. He knows that Ryan has been struggling, post graduation, in a different way than Spencer himself has been struggling. Spencer doesn’t know what he wants to do, but Ryan knows, and he’s convinced he can’t. That’s probably worse, Spencer thinks, and so he tries to be supportive even when Ryan loses another job because he doesn’t show up, even when Ryan blows him off to hang out with the literary egg heads.

Ryan brings food from work home when it’s his night to cook, but since the black bean and coconut burritos are better than anything Ryan’s ever poured out of a saucepan Spencer doesn’t mind.

“Poor Maja. She had another run in with Dermot today. I don’t know what she ever did to piss him off, but there’s something really sad about an angry dude with a bad hair piece, you know?” Spencer smiles as he talks. He can’t help but smile when he’s thinking about Maja, remembering the faces she’d made when Dermot’s back was turned.

“Who?” Ryan says, not looking up from the jackfruit tacos he’s dissecting.

“You work there,” Spencer says, “Can’t you ask for your tacos without onion?”

“Sometimes they forget,” Ryan glances up, his eyebrows knit together. His elbows are braced on the table and he’s hunched over his plate. He looks like a twelve year old with a science project. Spencer rolls his eyes, but he wants to reach over and touch Ryan’s cheek. Maybe after supper they can sit on the couch and watch a movie and Spencer can curl up to Ryan’s side and listen to his heart beat. He feels a little uncomfortable about how much he wants that; he and Ryan have been dating since junior year of college and friends since kindergarten, but they aren’t really like that.

“Anyway, who are you talking about?” Ryan asks, drawing Spencer’s attention back to the conversation.

“Uh, the lawyer guy,” Spencer says with a shrug. “I don’t know him, but he’s kind of a douche.”

“So why are you talking about him?” Ryan says. Spencer can see a piece of lettuce stuck between his front teeth as he chews.

“I’m not really. I’m talking about Maja.” Spencer is almost glad for Ryan’s innate ability to ruin a moment.

“Right, and who is that?” Ryan takes an exaggerated bite and then curses when half the toppings from his taco slide out onto the table.

“My friend from work,” Spencer says slowly.

“I didn’t know you had any friends there,” Ryan says, and Spencer feels like something heavy has settled in his gut. He puts his burrito down, appetite gone.

“I talk about Maja all the time,” he says quietly.

“I don’t remember you mentioning her,” Ryan shrugs, but he’s noticed that Spencer has stopped eating and puts down his own food. “Spencer, all you do is complain about that job. I’m sorry. I just... tune you out sometimes. It’s depressing, you obviously hate it and I just don’t always listen.”

“Okay,” Spencer says. “You can finish my burrito.”

And he goes to bed. He waits for Ryan to join him, to put a hand on his shoulder and apologize, or at least just lay down next to him, but Ryan stays up all night with his receipt paper and his moleskine and when Spencer gets up in the morning he finds Ryan, asleep on the couch.

The next day Spencer asks for Maja’s phone number, and on Saturday he invites her out for coffee. It’s different, seeing her outside of the office. She’s dressed all in black, casually hip in a black blazer and shorts with sandals that tie around her ankles. They drink espresso and share the weekend edition of the newspaper over the rickety table at the cafe Maja recommended. They don’t really talk, not until there’s only the sports section left and then Maja smiles at him.

“I’ve always wanted to go to the aquarium, but no one will go with me,” she says, and Spencer doesn’t even care that Saturday afternoon is probably the worst time to go to an aquarium, that it will be overrun with bratty children and cranky parents.

“Maybe they have stingrays,” he says.

Spencer doesn’t try to talk to Ryan about Maja again, he tells himself it’s because Ryan doesn’t care about his work friends, but he’s lying to himself. Maja isn’t just a work friend anymore, and Spencer might not know what they are to each other at this point, but he does know that Ryan would care.

He and Maja don’t kiss and they don’t fuck, but sometimes they hold hands when they’re out walking. One night, when Ryan is out with Z and Alex and his knot of poets, Spencer and Maja drink too many beers at a punk show. Spencer doesn’t know much about punk, but Maja does and when a band she knows comes through town she talks Spencer into going with her.

“Come on Spencer,” Maja isn’t even trying to keep her voice down and Spencer knows can almost hear his coworkers attention swing to them. He arches an eyebrow and Maja snorts, but she walks into his cubicle and sits on the edge of his desk and makes a passable effort at lowering her voice. “Who cares if you don’t know the band? Don’t you ever just want to scream and sweat and push with a hundred other crazy people?” Her eyes are sparkling and she leans in closer. “Be crazy with me.”

Spencer’s mouth is dry from how much he wants, and Maja must see something in his eyes because she claps her hands and laughs.

The night is everything Maja promised. The room is pulsing with a kind of energy that makes Spencer nervous until the music starts, until the second shot of whiskey and the third beer. Maja pulls him through the crowd as the bleach blond frontman howls and they make it within ten feet of the stage before they’re stopped by a writhing, jumping line of bodies. By the third song someone has dumped what feels like a full beer down the length of Spencer’s back, but his throat is raw from the alcohol and the yelling and the front of his t-shirt is sticky with sweat and he doesn’t give a shit about anything except Maja’s arm around his neck as she sings in his ear.

Later, after the encore when they’ve migrated back to the bar, Maja takes a picture of Spencer, sweaty and bruised with his hair sticking up every which way. Spencer scowls and tries to duck as she wields her iPhone, sloshing beer over his knuckles as he raises his hand to cover his face.

“Let me,” Maja cajoles, a sudden seriousness to her expression. “I want to remember you this way.”

Spencer feels something tight and spiky in his chest, and he lowers his arm. Maja is looking at him, and there’s something sad in her eyes that makes him want to look away. He makes a face to break the tension, and Maja indulges him with a smile.

It goes on much longer than it should.

On a Wednesday night not too long after, Ryan fucks him, rough and hard, and leaves bruises with his teeth and fingertips and Spencer shudders and cries when he comes. They lay side by side in the dark afterward.

“I know who she is now,” Ryan says. Spencer closes his eyes. He feels like a stranger in his own bed, like he and Ryan didn’t pick out the sheets at Target together a year ago, like he’s never seen the pile of laundry in the corner before. Like he doesn’t know the person lying next to him. “I saw you. Well, I saw a picture of you. Do you know William?”

“Maja’s friend,” Spencer says. William is tall and a little bit cruel, in the careless way that beautiful people can be.

“My friend, too. He didn’t know who you were, he took a picture of the two of you at Horseshoe last week.” Ryan doesn’t reach out, doesn’t move away, and his tone reveals nothing.

“I didn’t know you knew William,” Spencer says, though he isn’t surprised. Maybe he’d been hoping it would happen this way all along.

“He didn’t know I knew you,” Ryan says, and maybe that part is a surprise. It hurts.

“Your friends don’t know about me?” Spencer asks. He knows that Ryan has people in his life now that Spencer hasn’t met, but only through circumstance, he’d thought.

“That’s fucked up, right?” Ryan says. “I was mad, but then William asked me how I knew Maja. It didn’t even occur to him that I knew you.”

“Fucked up,” Spencer agrees.

“What are you doing with her?” Ryan asks finally.

“Nothing’s happened,” Spencer says, and he winces at how inadequate that is.

“Just because you haven’t actually slept together doesn’t mean nothing’s going on,” Ryan points out. He pauses, and Spencer doesn’t know what to say to that without lying. He feels the mattress shift before he realizes what’s happening, blinks when Ryan’s face hovers over his. He can just make out the whites of Ryan’s eyes, can see his arm tremble where it’s braced next to Spencer’s shoulder.

“I’m not giving you up,” Ryan says, and Spencer is horrified when he feels his eyes start to water. Ryan kisses his cheeks, his nose, his temple.

“I’m sorry, I love you,” Spencer says, and “I’m sorry, I love her, too.”

On a Sunday afternoon Spencer kisses Maja and Ryan writes a receipt paper poem about the sunlight in their hair.


End file.
